The World of Stargate

Stargate Technology

While it is virtually impossible for us to create something like a functional stargate system, the premise behind the movie and the television shows is that someone else, in the distant past, became advanced enough in knowledge and technology to devise the means of creating temporary stable wormholes between two points in space.

A wormhole, if such things exist, is considered to be a shortcut through space (and possibly time), although how it could shorten any distances is not easy to envision (or explain). The most commonly shared hypotheses suggest that wormhole may be created by black holes, due to the effect of super-massive gravity on space and time. Stephen J. Hawking, considered by many to be the world's leading astrophysicist, has argued that black holes probably don't function as the popular media (and many scientists) have portrayed them.

Rather than sucking in everything and never releasing anything back into the universe, Hawking has suggested that black holes may convert the matter they draw in to themselves to energy which is then dissipated, or radiated, back outward.

Whatever the cause and nature of black holes, the wormhole technology of the Stargate universe requires relatively little gravity to work. So far as has been revealed on the show, a stargate can function (open a wormhole or receive one) so long as it is near a planetary body. Once the stargate moves away from a planetary body, if it doesn't have an active wormhole connected to it, the gate is rendered inert.

The stargate wormholes are like vanishing pathways in a dense forest. They appear as if by magic, allowing the occupants of the forest to move from one glade to the next, but then they vanish and leave the occupants stranded. Nonetheless, the network of stargates is considered to be so vast as to allow a remarkable degree of migration across incredible distances.

One aspect of stargate technology which has been underutilized in the television shows is that the stargate network would provide the means for rapidly disseminating information. Faster than any broadcast medium, an entire library of data could be transmitted to key worlds around the universe by a single stargate. Each of those key worlds would then be able to transmit copies of that library to many more worlds.

The stargate network thus acts very much like the Internet, and its interconnectivity has been partially explored in a couple of storylines, such as "Window of Opportunity", the Stargate-SG1 episode where a human archaeologist from another world attempts to use Ancient time-controlling technology to save his wife. He accidentally creates a time loop in which more than a dozen worlds experience the same 12 hours over and over again for a period of at least 90 days.

Because the gate network experiences at least minimal multi-node interconnectivity, it is possible to pass a virus throughout the system, infecting the Dial-Home-Devices that control the gates. That capability means that the DHDs could probably be used to pass information between worlds imperceptibly. That is, messages could be embedded in the DHD energy patterns in an encoded form. Those messages could be used by any number of civilizations to track stargate activity. In effect, the stargate network could log its own usage and report to a central library.

Given that the stargate network was created by the Ancients, who had ships capable of traveling vast distances at great speed, one must ask why they felt the need to build the network. Did they do it just because they thought they could? Did they begin building the network at a time when their ships were inefficient?

A wormhole travelling system is more useful to a less advanced civilization like Earth because, even though the network is limited only to worlds with active stargates, it obviates the need for building spaceships capable of interstellar travel. Generations, if not centuries or millennia, of technological development can be bypassed or deferred while new worlds are explored and colonized (or fought for).

On the other hand, a network of doorways between worlds can be used almost casually. Lewis Carroll may have been the first person to propose such an idea, in which Alice passes through the looking glass and finds other ways to Wonderland. Wonderland certainly doesn't seem to be a world like Earth, but it's a fantasy world or fairy-tale world. Folklore has people wandering into and out of Faerie, an imaginary world close to but not quite our own, but they usually do so by mistake (although the fairy-folk travel between worlds at will).

It would be difficult for people to wander into and out of worlds by mistake with the stargate system. One must know an active address in order to travel to a distant world, and one must know the return address in order to get home.

Assuming that even a very primitive people are instructed in how to use the stargate network, and provided with a list of functional addresses, they would still exist inside a closed system for several reasons. First of all, they would only have access to a finite number of worlds. Secondly, they would have no way to know what the state of those worlds is, unless someone volunteered to pass to a world and come back.

Given the number of dead, lifeless worlds the SGC teams have discovered, it's unlikely any primiive societies would sustain such a loss of life for long. Hence, (disregarding the Goa'uld storyline) stargates would become objects of terror and misunderstanding to a primitive society simply because the people would not know what passing through the stargate would mean for anyone. Most travellers would be expected not to return, and would be assumed to die. A stargate is thus not very useful to a primitive society, and might only be used as a means of punishing criminals (in fact, an advanced world did just that in an early episode of Stargate-SG1).

A stargate network can only be useful to a society with at least enough technology to attempt minimal remote exploration, as the SGC does with M.A.L.P. (Mobile All-terrain Laboratory Platform) units that are sent through wormholes to conduct initial exploration. If a M.A.L.P. detects a breathable atmosphere, relatively hospital conditions (not too hot, not too cold, no serious radiation or booby traps) AND a DHD (Dial-Home-Device), a human team of explorers is sent through to conduct further investigations.

Sometimes, things turn out to be other than what they seem. The DHD may not be functioning, the atmosphere may have unknown (and therefore undetectable) biological or chemical components, or someone may be lying in wait, intending to kill any intruders (in which case, why don't they just bury the stargate?). In one episode, the SG1 team brought back an alien Artificial Intelligence from a world that only explored other worlds by infecting unwary visitors with implants and sending them home (altering their memories to hide the society's existence).

Despite the fact that the stargate network is artificial, it has evolved on its own. That is because the original builders, the Ancients, abandoned the network. They moved on to another region of space (for a while and for reasons we don't know). The races which the Ancients had contact with apparently took over use of some portions of the stargate network, but apparently it as seized by the Goa'uld.

The movie portrays Ra as the last of his kind, apparently the original builders of the stargate system (it had at least two functional gates that we know of). In the television series, we learn that Ra is really just a snake-like parasite who inhabits a human host. His species evolved on a relatively primitive world alongside a large humanoid species called Unas.

Presumably, somewhere in the distant past, a Goa'uld possessed an Unas and compelled it to pass through the stargate. Colonel O'Neill and Teal'c encountered an Unas in a labyrinthan trap who claimed to be the first one (the first Goa'uld/Unas combination? the first victim of the trap?). As more and more Goa'uld took Unas hosts and compelled them to leave their world, the parasites discovered other worlds where they could impose their will on smaller, weaker beings.

In time, the Goa'uld discovered human-inhabited worlds and began taking human hosts. The Goa'uld also began discovering and making use of advanced technology. By mastering that technology, they were able to build a far-reaching civilization capable of enslaving thousands of worlds (and presumably many species). They learned to build spaceships and to adapt many other technologies to their use.

But in creating their feudal empire, the Goa'uld introduced the inhabitants of those worlds to each other. The Jaffa slaves of the Goa'uld operate the spaceships, watch over the slaves, raid each other's worlds, guard the stargates, and explore the stargate network.

One must wonder how the Goa'uld acquired all their stargate addresses. Obviously, they had to dial the gate on their homeworld repeatedly until they found an active connection -- but why did they bother to attempt it in the first place? And why did the SGC find their world in a very primitive state? The implication seems to be that any Goa'uld who leave the world never return. If they never figured out how to return to their original world, then they had to use whatever worlds they originally dialed out to as their points of origin. That is, they knew the coordinates to those worlds, so as soon as they disovered other active addresses, they were able to establish two-way travel only between their first discovered worlds and all subsequent worlds.

Hence, the Goa'uld must have branched out across the stargate network randomly. Their expansion would at first have been slow, and presumably many of them died as soon as they stepped through the gates, or soon afterward. But a few began to acquire power, wealth, and technology, and as they accumulated more active addresses they began to harness the resources of multiple worlds.

The Goa'uld phenomenon thus seems almost inevitable, provided the functioning stargate network is left in an indeterminate state. That is, in order to explain the Goa'uld civilization, the writers of Stargate-SG1 had to propose a more ancient source for the stargate network. The Goa'uld were simply too disorganized and socially inept to produce something sophisticated like the stargate network.

The logical progression thus looks like this: the Ancients evolved on Earth to a state where they achieved an inefficient form of interstellar travel. They then developed the ability to create and use wormholes to travel between planetary objects (perhaps only between star systems). Hence, they used their inefficient ships to slowly distribute stargates throughout the galaxy. Eventually, they improved their ability to travel between stars to the point where the stargate network became less important to them. Eventually, they abandoned the network altogether, perhaps only after leaving this galaxy to explore other areas of the universe (since it appears they established stargates on their 1,000 or so colony worlds in the Pegasus galaxy).

The other races with whom the Ancients had been friendly, including the Asgard, the Nox, and the Furlings, also stopped using the stargate network, or at least cut back on such usage. The Asgard appointed themselves guardians over certain very primitive worlds, perhaps after fighting a war with the Goa'uld. One must infer that Asgard technology was at one time incapable of defeating the Goa'uld en masse. Otherwise, why stop at freeing only a few dozen worlds as stipulated in the Protected Worlds Treaty?

The broad implication is that the Goa'uld had a long period of time, probably spanning thousands of years, in which they were free to explore the stargate network, conquer whole worlds, and acquire technology which made them formiddable enemies. But given that the Goa'uld System Lords don't cooperate very easily, one must ask who it was who assembled the library of addresses recorded in the Abydos Kartouche. Did Ra become so powerful that he was able to force all the other System Lords into near-complete obedience? Many of the Goa'uld encountered by SG1 seem grateful to learn that Ra is dead. He doesn't seem to have had many friends among his own kind.

The Abydos Kartouche itself implies a degree of cooperation not seen among the Goa'uld in other ways. Even when they band together in the face of a common threat, they are reluctant to share information. Their knowledge of the stargate network is thus limited not only by their collective exploratory experience, but also by their mistrust of one another. Each System Lord controls only a small number of worlds and those worlds may be used to hide or mask a "homeworld" whose address is relatively unknown to other Goa'uld. The coordinats of a master world would be valuable indeed, as the Goa'uld would have nowhere to flee from his enemies if they knew all the addresses he had access to.

Ra might have controlled the other Goa'uld simply by knowing where they lived. The other Goa'uld may have been kept off balance by Ra if he had one or more secret worlds they could not get to. So, it another plausible inference is that Ra bludgeoned or stole all the addresses he accumulated from his rivals. They may not have had anywhere near the number of addresses in their libraries that Ra had acquired. If that is so, it may explain why Ra was able to travel between worlds so easily -- that is, he didn't leave large garrisons of warriors behind on some worlds because, even if they were known to other Goa'uld, any encroachment upon Ra's worlds would have called down his wrath on their own homeworlds.

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